


Vaster than Empires (And More Slow)

by Kanthia



Series: every flying whale is the wind fish [7]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Gen, Psychological, Reincarnation, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 02:20:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19781251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: There is a sword at the centre of the Great Hyrule Forest, and by every account, it belongs to Link.





	Vaster than Empires (And More Slow)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dear Princess Zelda](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/497935) by insertdisc5. 



> I weirdly came to regret not putting more stuff about the Master Sword in "The Boy in the Blue Hood" so...here it is lol
> 
> In the vein of Ursula Le Guin's [Vaster than Empires And More Slow](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6337247-vaster-than-empires-and-more-slow) and Daryl Gregory's [Second Person, Present Tense](http://www.f.waseda.jp/sidoli/Gregory_Second_Person_Present_Tense.pdf).

_We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.  
_(Ursula Le Guin)

What is at the precise centre of Hyrule? Go on, take a gander. One might be inclined to guess Hyrule Castle, the seat of the long-forgotten monarchy; or Kakariko Town, the centre of a series of tenuously linked trade routes; or, if you intend to get cheeky, you might take a ruler and straightedge and place the mathematical centre of Hyrule somewhere just northwest of the Mabe Village Ruins.

It’s a trick question, of course. _You_ are at the precise centre of the world at any given moment, wherever you are: thus the centre of Hyrule is on the Great Plateau, and then at the Duelling Peaks, and then in Kakariko Town, Hateno Village, the Walnots, Zora’s Domain.

On the insistence of an old dead man Link had gone west to Kakariko, and then on the insistence of an old woman he’d gone west again to Hateno, and then on the insistence of another old woman he’d gone back to Kakariko Town, with a brief sojourn on Mount Lanayru, and then he’d sat atop one of the fingerlike hills over Lantern Lake wondering what exactly Impa had meant by _Divine Beast_. The thing atop Mount Lanayru had certainly been a beast, and it had struck him as something divine -- but that situation was just a consequence of his hundred-year nap, and the thing Impa wants him looking for is not a dragon.

So he’d dragged himself down the west face of the mountain, half-dead of cold and hunger; had nearly finished the job of killing himself with an ill-timed encounter with a Lynel west of the Naydra Snowfield; and then pausing for a moment to rest and evaluate the extent of his injuries in the shadow of the ruins of the Great Gate, he’d turned to look briefly back at the mountain, and he’d remembered --

\-- Well, he’d remembered _something_. In the red light of the setting sun he’d suddenly remembered five people of five different races, faces without names, faces whose names escaped him, rolling off the edges of his memory with no traction. He’s detached from the situation, watching himself feel -- disappointed? Sorry? -- The girl Zora, the way her lips had wrapped so prettily around the word _healing_ \-- and without warning he is struck by the realization that whoever she was he might have, a century ago, loved or been loved by her.

When he’s cognisant of himself again he is no longer standing among friends (allies? compatriots? consequences?) at the foot of Mount Lanayru on the eve of the apocalypse; it’s grown dark, he’s wearing old clothes he’d bought for a handful of rupees, and he is very much alone. A bird crows at the moon. He is tired and hungry and badly injured. He finds tinder in his pack and makes a meal of dried fish and mushrooms, bandages himself slowly, finds himself in a morose and contemplative mood on account of the strange memory, and decides he needs to climb a mountain to get a different point of view.

(It’s already so difficult to reconcile who he is with the person he assumes he used to be. He stares at the stars and thinks about the word _healing_ and the look of discontent on the Rito’s face, and wonders: who, exactly, were those people? And what, exactly, was Link supposed to be to them?)

* * *

Imagine the mind is a castle and the body is its country. The meetings and debates and councils of the aristocracy are turned into decisions, and decisions are brought to the king. The king is the sense of self, whose job it is to weave that multitude of voices into a single sense of nation -- or, in the case of this metaphor, whose job it is to weave one’s thoughts and experiences and desires into a coherent narrative which one will use to continually define oneself.

Then you set the king to sleep for a hundred years, and when you wake him up you leave him no memory or purpose, no sense of self, no continuity to the narrative, and you ask him to continue business as usual -- what right do you have to make such a demand of a nation with no leader, a castle with no king, a man with no centre? Link wakes to his head in the same state as Hyrule, overgrown and lovely, and in that blank world reinvents his own self.

Long live the king!

* * *

There’s a vegetable growing in Link’s ribcage, somewhere between his lungs: a spring plant, artichoke or cauliflower or radish. It’s a fragile little thing, having sat unattended in the dark for so long, and he tends to it carefully with sunlight and water and unspoken conversation.

But for the little caged radish in his chest, Link’s world is all exteriors: mountaintops, plains, pathways, the husks of burnt-out buildings. Rarely does he have a roof over his head rarer still does he have four sturdy walls around him -- save for when he’s spirited into the bowels of the earth to play a game with some long-dead monk, of course -- and small spaces make him nervous. Malice clings to interiors, spreads like rot on the insides of wrought things: stone buildings, Guardians’ guts, the feelings of the Zora people towards Hylians.

Something waits, quiet and severe, at the foot of Death Mountain. Link had been exploring the ridge near Goronbi Lake looking for Fireproof Lizards, looked west into the setting sun and saw an immense forest marked by a tree in perpetual spring bloom, and had briefly remembered something else -- an omen perhaps, or a premonition, that girl’s voice saying _I’m ready to expect the worst._

The situation has changed but the tree remains, and that in and of itself is worth investigating.

So he leaves Death Mountain and goes west. The pleasant little path gives way to larger and larger trees, and the Great Hyrule Forest asserts itself with an undergrowth so thick that travellers call it the _Lost Woods;_ they speak of it in hushed tones, but so did they with Vah Ruta, or Dinraal, or the Great Plateau. Link has learned to observe and experience before fearing: there are things laugh at him in the mist, and a haunting melody on the wind -- but that same wind blows him gently towards his destination, and the things in the mist have left him torches to light the way. Never easy, but kind -- that is Link’s Hyrule.

(He’s wasting time, shamefully delaying his rescue of Daruk’s bound spirit. In Lanayru he had learned that her name was Mipha and that she did, in fact, love him; he’d stared at her statue and tried to find that same love in his little vegetable heart, but if the old Link had loved her back, the new one cannot remember.

He wishes that man had given her a gift to prove if her love had been reciprocated, something that would withstand one hundred years of decay -- a carving of bone, perhaps, or a stringed instrument. As it stands, her spirit is silent on the issue. All he receives, in return for his musing, is her grace.)

* * *

Imagine the mind is a castle, the body is its country, and memory is its citizens: a nation may define itself by its king or queen or government, but in reality it is the people who give it its true character.

So you exorcise the citizens and set the body to sleep for one hundred years, where it slowly sloughs off skin cells until it has, ostensibly, regenerated entirely but for its little vegetable heart.

Is it, upon waking, the same person?

If so, why?

If not, what has it become?

* * *

  
At the centre of fear is courage. At the centre of courage is the willingness to act. At the centre of the Lost Woods is the Korok Village, and at the centre of the Korok Village is the Master Sword.

“Well, it’s you,” the Deku Tree says.

At the centre of the world is Link, and at the centre of a man are his memories -- but without its memory, eternally forgetting and rebirthing in the light of the Blood Moon, the world’s a little off-kilter.

 _I_ _t is me,_ he thinks.

So he replaced the memories of the world by planting a little vegetable heart and relearned it piece-by-piece, starting with the Great Plateau; it’s not the worst way to put a world back together after one hundred years asleep.

“You certainly took your time,” it says: but not with condescension or accusation, but rather like a father gently scolding his beloved child.

Between them, slumbering softly, is the Master Sword. She has waited for a long time, and she can stand to wait for a long time more; after all, for her, eternity is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

 _Perhaps I did,_ he thinks.

The Deku Tree recognizes him, but does the sword? Link remembers neither of them, but that’s neither here nor there: he remembers the feeling of the cool breeze on the Great Plateau, and the sight of Naydra on Mount Lanayru, and the taste of Kakariko rice hot and salty and moreish; and he remembers that Mipha loved him, and he thinks he remembers who Daruk was. At some point in the near future he thinks he may remember who the Rito and the Gerudo were, and perhaps he might come to terms with what he had meant to Zelda and Hyrule.

Until then --

\-- He reaches for the sword.

“You wielded it one hundred years ago,” the Tree says, and he stills his hand. “But I warn you to take caution -- as you are now, I cannot say whether you are worthy or not to hold it.”

As he is now?

The Deku Tree looks to him, and sighs with the sound of an old tree creaking in the wind. Its steady and compassionate gaze reminds Link, somehow, of the way Mipha’s ghost says _it is my pleasure_ : held to meaningless duty, rubbed raw by an unending century until all that remains is a single thing to do, a thing for whom time only restarted when Link entered its story.

The Master Sword sends a shower of sparks, white-blue, at his hand. Someone says something in his head. A Korok laughs. It is Link’s sword, it is not his sword. Link remembers the Shrine of Resurrection: waking to the cold and dark and wet, confused, unscarred. It is for resurrection, not restoration or healing or regeneration. Someone died one hundred years ago, had their body placed lovingly in a chamber of embalming fluid to await the day that the goddesses sent another hero -- only to have that hero’s spirit move, perhaps unwillingly, into an old and forgotten home.

The head’s a castle, and the body a country. If the wrong guy moves in and sits himself on the throne, do you still take a knee and swear fealty? Depends if your loyalty is to king or to country.

And to whom is the Master Sword loyal?

 _I think I should go for a while_ , he thinks. He’s itchy, like how an open wound itches as it starts to heal.

“Perhaps it best you do,” the Deku Tree says. “We will still be here, when you return.”

* * *

So Link goes, and he pulls Daruk out of the dark, and then swings in a wide counterclockwise arc in the general direction of Hebra, where Revali waits impatiently. He collects safflina and wild berries, learns to cook bannock, and discovers a secret hot spring in the Sturnida Basin. He improves with a bow and arrow. He befriends mountain goats. He stands on mountaintops and looks south to the Gerudo Wasteland.

At night he dreams not of a dead man’s mistakes but of the Death Mountain caldera, the ghost in the rafters of the Temple of Time, the feeling of gutting a fresh voltfish. When he finds old memories clinging to the dirt he boxes them up and stores them in his attic, to be pondered another time, or to be offered to that sword at the centre of the woods.

Someday Link will dig his heels into the ground and his little radish heart will grow, slowly slowly slowly into a forest of its own, an enormous forest bigger than the Koroks’ woods, bigger than Hyrule has ever been, a forest that will outlast every king and queen and empire. Then, he will go back to the Master Sword.

Until then --

\-- Well, there are things he’d like to do, and a person he’d like to become.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](https://kanthia.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
